I still have my OG Genesis in the garage. A couple of years ago I opened it up because the LED wasn’t turning on - the system itself worked perfectly fine, just the light. Don’t remember everything that happened but since then it hasn’t powered on. I’m tempted to toss it, but then again, it’s like 30 years old, so I think it deserves better.

I even remember the day I got it.

My parents would have killed me if they knew I spent money on a gaming console. I got dropped off over to my friend’s house as a sleep-over because it was summertime. He lived within walking distance of Toys R Us. Went there with a bunch of cash and bought it and brought it back to his house. I knew I couldn’t just bring the whole box back home without my parents knowing what was up, so I unboxed it and put each piece into a different plastic bag and mixed them all up in with my sleeping bag. To most people, it just looked like a mess of random electronic toys. When my mother came to pick me up, she started gossiping away with my friends mom for like 20 minutes. I asked her to pop the trunk and I snuck all the things into the car. When we finally got home, I pretended that I forgot the stuff in the trunk, so I went down to the garage and grabbed them a little at a time to bring back to my room. Thankfully the console itself wasnot that big so I kept it in one of the drawers in my desk, but I ran all the wires out the back. Over the next few weeks, I took out more and more of the parts and put them on my desk. At this point, it looked like any other piece of random electronics, so no one ever knew I did this. This is literally the first time I’ve ever told this story. Not sure if anyone else could relate, but toys and having fun were rather low priorities so ya had to sneak in whatever gaming you could do.